Cultivate Your Look of Astonished Disdain: Seven Mentoring Lessons from Frances Smith Foster

When I received my doctorate from Emory University in 1999, I walked across campus with my dissertation chair and mentor, Dr. Foster. As we crossed the quad, she said to me, "Well, you may as well learn to call me Frances now, doctor." Having been part of a 1990s-era graduate program in which we addressed almost all professors by first name, I realized how natural it had been to make an exception for and to give a formal title to this person who had been so influential to my graduate career. It took a while, but over time I made the transition to calling her Frances; our fundamental relationship did not so much change as it broadened and deepened. Now, more than ten years later, she remains my mentor and sounding board.

Others in this issue speak to the scholarship Frances inspired and the research lessons she instilled. I would not at all be the scholar I am today without having benefited from Frances as a teacher and model scholar. Every day in my scholarly life, I ask questions, notice absences, and search for sources that will help me lift my research to meet the high standards she modeled. Yet that is not all that Frances's mentoring entailed. Writing about her as a mentor strikes me as a deeply personal assignment, so I am going to approach it on that level. Here are seven (among many) lessons that Frances taught me, specifically.

Those of you for whom she has also served as a mentor and adviser—and I know there are many of you—may recognize one or two of the following. Yet it is also possible that she advised completely different, even opposing, strategies. In fact, some of what follows is itself contradictory or multiple. But that is Lesson #1: Individualize your mentoring. What distinguishes mentoring from teaching is, in part, the responsibility to respond to the person in front of you—in the particular time and place and with the particular degree of kindness and toughness for the situation. Over the years, Frances's advice to me has changed. What she advised for me is not always what I heard her say to others, and what I took from the advice was often as much a matter of spirit as it was strategy. However, when I turn to her with a hard question, I am absolutely certain she is answering me—not generically, not universally, but specifically. As a result, simply put, I take her advice. Even when I do not necessarily want to. It is just part of the contract, to my mind.

Relatedly, Lesson #2: Make them ask twice. Of course, for such a contract to work, both parties have to understand not only each other but also themselves. As a second-year graduate student, I presented myself to Frances during her office hours and asked if she would direct my comprehensive exams and future dissertation. She looked at me for a hard minute, turned back to her desk full of papers, books, and archival manuscripts, and said firmly, "No." Taken aback, I thanked her, left her office, and wandered out into that same quadrangle we would later walk across in mutual doctoral regalia. By the following week, I had gotten my back up. I went again to her office hours and said something along the lines of, "No, really. Here is why I want to work with you. My project needs the following from you. My approach to this career would benefit from you in these ways. I would like to learn these types of things from you one-on-one. And I propose the following calendar of goals and deadlines for myself." Frances looked at me, smiled, and said, "That's better. Yes, I'll work with you." From that point forward, Frances was a committed, kind, and generous presence throughout my scholarly life. I am not sure that Frances made everyone ask twice, and she certainly did not do that for every request. However, that day's message to me—the implication that...